A Life That Was Never Lived

He could feel it. The end was getting closer. He had let his pride win, and in doing so, he'd broken one of the fixed points in time. And ever since, there had been those four knocks. Four knocks, again and again, endlessly echoing in his mind. There was nowhere he could run from them.

He stood before the console, thinking about everything he'd done with this body. Every planet. Every life. Every impossible thing he'd managed to survive. And now he was supposed to pass all of that on to someone whose mind would one day become a blur.

His gaze shifted to the coat hanging nearby. The Ood were calling. Was that his final stop? His final chapter? Or could he put it off just a little longer and go see Queen Elizabeth instead?

He didn't want to rush blindly towards his end. So he chose Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps a few peaceful days would do him some good. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could forget those four knocks echoing inside his head. He didn't believe that for a second, but still gave it a try.

He activated the console and set the time and location. He adjusted the coordinates and pushed the Time Rotor upwards. The TARDIS should have materialised within seconds.

One second passed. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven...

Something was wrong. The TARDIS should have landed by now.

The Doctor realized something was terribly wrong. When, all of a sudden, strange noises began coming from the console—sounds he had never heard from the TARDIS before. The ship was lurching violently, almost as if it were being thrown through space and time.

As the Doctor tried to figure out what to do, the lights inside the TARDIS changed from white to red. His face was covered in fear.

Then, all at once, the ship went still — engines silent, lights fixed, nothing moving at all.

The TARDIS had stopped.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

Slowly, almost reluctantly — still turning it over in his head, what had happened to the TARDIS and a million other scenarios besides — he approached the doors.

"Time had trapped a Time Lord," he said. "How ironic."

To lighten the mood. Just for himself. There was no one else to hear it.

With trembling hands, he reached for the handle.

And pulled.

The doors swung inward, and the light of the console room spilled out onto whatever was standing there.

A short human. Round face. Very round face. With not so long nor not so short hair.

Well, with hair like that — going down to her shoulders — she had to be a woman. And this is what ends me? Really? Ah, Doctor. Look at you. What have you come to?

Clara looked at him with an expression of pure, baffled surprise.

"What?" she said — and you could hear the bafflement in her voice.

"What?" the Doctor answered.

"You?" Clara said, the bafflement still there.

"Yes. Me." He was trying to understand what was happening, and failing entirely.

“But you... how?” Clara said.

The Doctor put that grin back on his face, the way he always did — as though he'd just worked the whole thing out — and started talking with pure confidence and joy.

"What, are you surprised because it's bigger on the inside, or because it's me?"

"But you're the one before him," Clara said.

Now reality had hit, and it was confusing.

The Doctor stared at her, completely baffled.

"H— h— how did you even stop the TARDIS? What does 'the one before him' mean?"

Clara looked at him, trying to think of a way to explain it. She turned over a hundred different versions in her head, and each one came out more complicated than the last. So she settled on the simplest thing she could say.

"You're the Doctor before the one I know."

The Doctor still couldn't make sense of any of it. He looked past her, out into whatever was beyond the doors, and realized he couldn't tell where they'd landed at all. No sky. No ground he recognized. Just her, and a great deal of nothing behind her.

"No. No, no, no. That's — that's not how any of this works." He was pacing now, back into the console room, waving a hand at her to follow. "Time Lords don't just bump into each other's futures. There are rules. Enormous, boring, terribly important rules, and I'm the one who usually breaks them, so I'd know."

"I'm not a Time Lord."

"No, you're not, you're a — " he stopped, and looked at her properly for the first time. "What are you, exactly?"

"I'm Clara."

"That's a name, not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

He circled the console, flicking switches that did nothing, watching readouts that told him nothing. The TARDIS wasn't just stopped. She was silent, in a way she hadn't been in nine hundred years. "How did you find me?"

"I didn't. You found me. Or something did." Clara stepped inside, glancing around at the console room like she was checking it against a memory. "One minute I was somewhere else. The next I was standing outside this door. Knocking."

"Four times," the Doctor said quietly.

"What?"

"You knocked four times."

Clara frowned. "Is that — was I not supposed to?"

He didn't answer that. He couldn't, not without explaining a prophecy he'd been running from for months, so instead he asked the question underneath it. "Where is he? The one you know. The one after me."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you." She was choosing her words very carefully now. "We got separeted. And I think something's gone very wrong with your space and time, and I think I'm the only person who can see it, and I know how that sounds—"

"It sounds mad."

"Yes."

"Completely mad."

"Yes."

"Go on, then."

Clara took a breath. "Do you trust me?"

The Doctor looked at her for a long moment.

"You just stopped the greatest invention in the universe at the worst possible moment," he said. "And frankly, I'm still trying to understand how a face can be that oval."

“Then read my mind” Clara said. With pure confidence in her voice and face.

Doctor was baffled, “How do you know I can do that?”

"Trust me. I know. I know you better than anyone."

For a moment he didn't move. There were a great many reasons not to do this — telepathic contact with a human was invasive, dangerous, and, in his experience, deeply rude — but every single one of those reasons had already been out-argued by the fact that the TARDIS was dead behind him and this woman had knocked four times.

He slowly raised both hands and placed his fingertips against the sides of her round face, thumbs at her temples, the way he had a hundred times before with a hundred other minds. Her skin was warm. She didn't flinch. She'd done this before — he could tell, because she tilted her head into it slightly, the way you do when someone else knows the way better than you.

"This might feel strange," he said.

"It always does."

Always. He didn't have time to ask what that meant.

He closed his eyes and reached in.

And for a moment there was nothing unusual at all. The ordinary architecture of a human mind — soft, cluttered, warm as a kitchen. A childhood. A leaf. A mother's voice. The smell of something burning. He moved through it gently, the way you walk through someone else's house when they've invited you in but you still take your shoes off.

Then the floor gave out.

She wasn't one mind. She was thousands.

It hit him all at once, like standing under a waterfall and being asked to count the drops. Clara in a red dress on a spaceship he'd never seen. Clara in Victorian skirts, falling. Clara covered in soot in a place that smelled of coal fire. Clara dying. Clara dying again. Clara dying a third time, and a fourth, and a hundredth, each death an ending and none of them the end, scattered through his own history like ash blown across every page of a book he'd already read.

And she was in his life. That was the part that made his hearts stumble. She was in the corner of a market on Gallifrey, saying something to a young man who hadn't stolen a TARDIS yet. She was a face in a crowd on a beach in 1963. She was there in a war he hadn't fought, and a shop he'd never entered, and a moment he was absolutely certain he'd been alone for.

And then the futures.

Faces he didn't recognise. Faces that were his.

A man in a bow tie with an old young face, laughing, running, holding her hand.

A grey-haired man with fierce eyebrows and eyes like winter, who looked at her the way you look at the last light in a dark house.

And more. And more. Faces stacked behind faces, receding into a distance he had no right to see, all of them him, all of them coming, all of them after.

The Doctor's expression changed.

Confusion first — a small crease between his brows, the look of a man checking his arithmetic.

Then shock, arriving all at once, his mouth falling slightly open.

Then fear. Bare, unguarded fear, the kind he never let anyone see, because he had just understood that the four knocks were not the end of him. They were a door. And something on the other side of it had reached back through his entire life and put this girl in every single moment of it, and had been doing so for centuries, and he had never once noticed.

He saw everything.

Every memory.

Every version.

Everything.

His hands were shaking against her temples. He pulled them away as though she'd burned him and staggered back against the console, breathing hard.

"You," he said. "You're impossible."

Clara opened her eyes, and there were tears in them, and she didn't seem to know why.

"I know," she said. "That's what he calls me too."

The Doctor turned to her.

"So... Gallifrey is alive." His voice was barely above a whisper.

"All those billions and billions of lives... I th— I thought I was their killer. My entire life, I believed I had murdered them. I heard the names of everyone who died. I heard their screams. The screams of children. But all this time, they were still alive. Somewhere out there."

Suddenly the Doctor collapsed to the floor, clutching his head. "My head hurts."

Clara rushed to him, but she didn't know what to do. "Tell me what I can do."

"You can't. You showed me a life I haven't lived yet. I know my future now. That's against the rules of time." He grimaced. "I don't have much time left. I'm going to have to regenerate."

Clara helped him back to his feet. "So what do we do?"

The Doctor looked towards the console. "We're going back there."

"Where?" Clara said, curiosity all over her voice.

"Somewhere I was never supposed to go a second time."

Clara had never liked the Doctor's habit of answering questions with more questions — or, worse, refusing to answer them at all. Still, she had to admit it gave him a certain charm.

He walked towards the console.

"There's only one explanation that makes any sense..." He began working the controls. "I have to go back there."

Clara watched him entering the coordinates.

"How are we going to find him?"

"We can't. Not now. Who knows where he could have gone?"

"But couldn't you — I don't know — use your DNA or something? Set the coordinates and track him down?"

The Doctor stopped and turned to her, his face serious.

"Look, Clara. What just happened isn't only about me. You're not seeing the bigger picture."

He pulled the lever. The ground started shaking — but not the way it usually did. No, this was different. This was... this was something else.

The TARDIS began to move. But the strange noises returned, and it sounded almost as though she were trying to refuse.

"What's the bigger picture?" Clara said, still trying to work out what he was thinking.

The Doctor looked at her. "You'll see."

The TARDIS materialised. The Doctor threw open the doors and ran outside.

Clara followed.

Outside was a room with white walls. A window stood open to one side, sunlight streaming through it, filling the whole room with light. There was a bench to sit on, and a painting.

A painting so familiar.

Gallifrey Falls No More.

He knew this room. Not from his own life — he had never set foot in it — but from hers. He had watched it happen an hour ago with his fingertips against her temples. This was where he saved Gallifrey.

Where he would save Gallifrey.

Then a man came into the room. An old man, with a nose that was a little on the large side and a shock of white hair. It was clear he wasn't walking comfortably — slow, careful, one hand out for balance.

That man wasn't a stranger either.

It was the Curator.

He continued his slow progress across the room, lowered himself onto the bench, and sat.

He didn't look at them.

"Took you long enough," the Curator said, gazing up at the painting. "What was it — two seconds?"

He turned to them then, with a small smile, as though he'd made a joke only he was old enough to find funny.

Neither of them could make any sense of what he meant. But they had bigger problems.

The Doctor crossed the room and sat down beside him. He leaned in close to the old man's ear and began to whisper.

Clara couldn't hear a word of it.

He whispered for five, maybe ten seconds. Then the two of them simply looked at each other. Not a word. The Doctor got to his feet and started stepping back — slowly, but surely.

Clara watched them carefully. What was he hiding?

The Curator reached into his coat and pulled out a strange object. It looked almost like a pen, and yet its handle resembled the hilt of a sword.

He raised it, and began to write on the painting.

As he wrote, he suddenly began screaming in agony.

"Doctor! What's happening to him?" Clara shouted.

"The painting is fixed to a time and a place. It was locked." The Doctor stared at him. "He's changing it."

"What will happen to him?"

"He's changing a fixed point in time and space." He paused. "Even a Time Lord isn't allowed to do that."

"So he's going to die?"

"Yes." The sadness was written all over his face.

Clara looked at him in horror. "And you're going to let him?"

"I have no other options."

She ran towards the Curator. The Doctor caught her from behind and placed three fingers against her forehead.

"I'm sorry."

Clara fell unconscious.

The Curator kept writing through the pain.

A blinding white light burst from the painting, hiding the words from view. Still he kept writing.

Until finally, he stopped.

He collapsed. Half his body was burned.

The Doctor stared at the painting.

There, at the very centre of Gallifrey's protective shield, two words had been written:

BAD WOLF